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secure-web-server.md

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Secure Web server

As you know your CMDB contains sensitive data no 3rd-party should ever have access to – even from your local network. To harden this virtual appliance you should enforce HTTPS for all clients (Web browser and 3rd-party tools). All non-secure connections will be redirected to a secure connection.

A quick win is your Web server also can switch to the new and significant faster HTTP/2 protocol which requires a secure connection over HTTPS.

Notice: After enabling these settings only modern Web browsers and 3rd-party tools are able to connect to i-doit via HTTPS. So please keep your software applications and libraries up-to-date.

Copy certificates

First step is to copy your X.509-based certificate file (including the complete intermediate certificate chain) and the private key file to /etc/ssl/.

Notice: We do not provide pre-generated certificates. Please use your own certificate authority (CA) to generate them or try a well-known CA like Let's Encrypt.

Change Apache settings

On the command-line edit the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/i-doit-secure.conf with root rights:

sudo editor /etc/apache2/sites-available/i-doit-secure.conf

At the beginning you see some lines beginning with Define.

Change IDOIT_HOST with the proper hostname/FQDN/IP address you're using for this virtual appliance.

Also replace the values in IDOIT_CERT_FILE and IDOIT_CERT_KEY_FILE with the paths to your certificates.

An optional extra step to anonymize Apache's access logs. Un-comment the setting LogFormat so no IP addresses will be logged anymore.

If you're unsure what each setting mean refer to the Apache Web server documentation.

Enable settings

Replace the pre-defined non-secure settings with these settings and restart Apache Web server:

sudo a2dissite i-doit
sudo a2ensite i-doit-secure
sudo a2enmod headers
sudo a2enmod ssl
sudo a2enmod http2
sudo apachectl configtest
sudo systemctl restart apache2.server

Make sure no error occurs.

Does it work?

Now comes the exciting part: Does everything smoothly?

  1. If you open i-doit in your favorite Web browser insecurely with http:// you should be redirected to https:// automagically.
  2. Take a deeper look at what information your Web browser provides about the connection to i-doit. There should be no warnings.
  3. For command-line lovers try out these commands:
curl http://cmdb.example.com/ --head

This outputs the following headers (not all headers are shown):

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval' data: http://cmdb.example.com:80 https://cmdb.example.com:443
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=15768000; includeSubDomains
Location: https://cmdb.example.com/

Redirection to HTTPS works like a charme. Now try:

curl https://cmdb.example.com/ --head

Output:

HTTP/2 200
content-security-policy: default-src 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval' data: http://cmdb.example.com:80 https://cmdb.example.com:443
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block
x-content-type-options: nosniff
strict-transport-security: max-age=15768000; includeSubDomains

Nice. Not only Apache gives you an HTTP status code 200 OK via a secure connection over HTTPS but also the used protocol is HTTP/2.

In both examples there are some security- and privacy-related HTTP headers we included as best practice.

Last thing is to check the certificate provided by Apache:

openssl s_client -showcerts -connect cmdb.example.com:443

This gives you many details about the connection itself and the used certificate (and chain). Make sure TLSv1.2 is used.